Beyond Psychology (eBook)

Preface

This book lays the foundation for a way of helping another person to improve rapidly and profoundly the quality of life. This approach is unique in that it is both directive and non-judgmental. It provides guidance, yet allows people being helped to reach their own understandings and make their own judgments without receiving interpretations, approval, or disapproval. Since anyone can stand to improve the quality of life in some way, anyone can benefit from the techniques discussed in this book. Nevertheless, at present, these methods are directed toward people who are of average or above-average mental stability and who are not severely disturbed or psychotic. These techniques are not psychotherapy and are no substitute for therapeutic intervention in severe cases. I hope that one day ways will be found of applying the principles of metapsychology to the task of helping these very needy people. Meanwhile, the techniques discussed herein can help the vast majority.

Like any other general subject of study, metapsychology is not committed to a specific method, although methods exist as part of Applied Metapsychology, nor to a fixed belief system, although theories exist within the subject of metapsychology. It picks up where psychology, as the science of behavior, leaves off. Hence the name “metapsychology” has the correct connotation of being a study that goes “beyond” psychology—beyond the study of behavior to the study of that which behaves—the person him/herself—and the person’s perceptual, conceptual, and creative activity, as distinguished from the actions of the body. In this sense, “metapsychology” restores the original meaning of “psychology” as “the study of the psyche, or spirit”, and the applications of metapsychology reflect the perennial common goal of therapies, religions, and traditional philosophies, whether one calls this goal the attainment of sanity, of enlightenment, of happiness, of wisdom, or of salvation.

Throughout this book, I will be constantly consulting experiences that I believe we all have in common, as the basis for the points I am going to make. By consulting their own experience, readers can verify or falsify for themselves each of these points. I have assisted this process by including occasional brief exercises. These exercises will greatly enhance the reader’s understanding and will allow readers to verify for themselves the points made in the book. My only claim for acceptance of the ideas I am presenting is the assumption that different people have a great deal in common in what they experience and the way in which they experience it. This interpersonal commonality of experience is the fundamental truth that the metapsychological approach provides.

It took me many years of thinking and exploring a variety of different fields to arrive, eventually, at the conviction that this approach was best. Along the way, many different people and schools of thought have influenced my thinking.

It was John Goheen, then Chairman of the Stanford University Philosophy Department, who first kindled my interest in philosophy. In a seminar, Dr. Goheen, every bit the quintessential philosopher (complete with flowing white hair and abstracted manner) speculated: “Perhaps it is love that gives meaning to life.” For some reason (possibly because it was true), this statement made a deep impression on me. Dr. Goheen remained my mentor throughout my undergraduate years. It was under his tutelage that I studied Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (on which I did my Senior Honors Thesis) and R.M. Hare’s The Language of Morals (Hare, 1963). Both of these works greatly facilitated my thinking about ethics and communication.

After studying philosophy for a year at Cambridge University, however, I decided that my studies lacked purpose and applicability. I had always felt that philosophy ought to eventuate in a form of wisdom that would enable a person to lead the Good Life and to help others to do so. Modern philosophy, as I experienced it, seemed to lack wisdom.

I turned to psychiatry in the belief that psychiatrists must have a practical knowledge of life. After all, were they not daily involved in helping people solve their problems? For some reason, perhaps because my father was a physician, it never occurred to me to become a psychologist. During my five years at Yale Medical School, I was fortunate to receive a Freudian analysis from Dr. James Kleeman, a man whose personal characteristics, warmth, and ability to create a safe and therapeutic environment set a standard that has stayed with me ever since. I am sure I have incorporated many elements of his manner into my own style of helping. At least I hope I have.

During my residency training at Stanford University Medical Center, I had the valuable experience of working with Paul Watzlawick and others at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. They showed me that what was then a very unorthodox way of helping people could be quite effective.

During this time, I was profoundly disturbed by the work of Truex and Carkhuff (1967), who showed that the effectiveness of many current psychological approaches was by no means established empirically. I had also observed a lack of agreement amongst my teachers and colleagues with respect to diagnosis, prognosis, and recommended modes of therapy. In fact, there was no widely agreed-upon science or method in psychology. Each practitioner ultimately had to make up his/her own mind about what to do with each individual case. I was disheartened to find that the practical, predictable method for helping people I had hoped to find in psychiatry was not there. Also, having read several of Thomas Szasz’s brilliant books (Szasz, 1970, 1974), I became profoundly uneasy with the idea that helping someone to become happier had to be a medical or quasi-medical (“therapeutic”) action.

Therefore, while completing the last two years of my residency, I began to look outside of the more traditional schools of psychology and psychiatry. I looked into Gestalt therapy and encounter groups; I attended Esalen functions; I tried Psychocybernetics (Maltz, 1960) and Yoga.

Then came a thirteen-year interlude about which I have mixed feelings. These years were spent intensively studying and practicing the techniques of Dianetics and Scientology. Many people have advised me not to mention this episode in my life because the idea of Scientology sometimes conjures up disreputable images in the public mind. And thus, I was told, people would be predisposed to discredit my ideas. But these thirteen years, for all their negative aspects, proved to be a valuable learning experience. Eventually it became necessary for me to make a clear distinction in my own mind between:

•The organization (and its leaders: L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige), who have been perennially embroiled in controversy, and

•The theories and techniques themselves, many of which are quite humanitarian and have very positive effects.

In early 1984, once I had made this distinction, I made a point of severing all connections to the Scientology organization. What I am doing today has nothing to do with that organization, a fact about which both the organization and I are happy.

Despite our parting of the ways (which was not without drama) and despite the advice of some of my friends, I feel it would be wrong not to acknowledge the wealth of information I found in the Scientology materials. I have been able to put these materials to good use in my attempts to understand and align the data from all the various disciplines I have studied and to see the truths that all these disciplines contain. There was one year in which Scientology and psychiatry overlapped. During the day, I practiced “conventional” psychotherapy, and in the evenings I functioned as a Scientology practitioner. I found my work in the evening to be much more effective than the work I did during the day. This fact forced me to take the Scientology materials seriously.

These materials were produced over a period of more than thirty years. They were not only Hubbard’s work but also that of many other people, including tens of thousands of practitioners with a very high degree of uniformity in their practice and closely linked within a single organization. These practitioners could therefore compare notes and refine their ideas and techniques in a way that no group of psychologists or psychiatrists (with their disparate ideas and techniques and lack of organizational connections) could possibly do. It may be that there has never been such a large, organized, and homogeneous group of practitioners in any other helping profession. Certainly the number of practicing scientologists in the U.S. was, at least at one time, of comparable magnitude to the number of psychiatrists.

The wealth of practical and theoretical data accumulated thorough the actions and interactions of this group is extraordinary. There are probably hundreds of thousands of detailed case histories in Scientology archives. There are hundreds of books and thousands of tapes containing detailed descriptions of theories and methods. Much of this material is confusing, repetitive, wordy, and contradictory; some of it is secret; some of it is intensely interesting. I do not think anyone could read or listen to all of this material in any finite amount of time. I spent many years studying it, however, and I feel I have learned the most important parts.

Hubbard and the many others who have contributed to this collection of data, including...